Sunday, 13 August 2017

NGC6960: The Western Veil

The Veil Nebula is undoubtedly the most breath-taking supernova remnant in the sky and - to my humble taste - it's the most spectacular object in the rich summer constellation of Cygnus, the swan. The hot clouds of gas that were blown into space at 30,000km/s (!) when a giant star became critically unstable and exploded, have expanded in the last 6,000 years to a frail bubble 110 light-years in diameter. It is still growing at a rate of 170km/s and eventually the filaments of ionised gas will dissolve into space.

A year ago I showed you the eastern part of this nebular complex that spans an area of six full moons in our sky. This time, I'll show you a detail of its western part. This area is notoriously famous for the extremely bright star that seems to lie right in the middle of it. 52 Cygni is a star of magnitude 4.22 and therefore easily visible to the naked eye, if there aren't too many useless street lights around. Again, you see how much appearances may deceive because this star lies at a distance of 210 light-years, whereas the Veil Nebula lies seven times further away from us. The star with its large "wings" of nebulosity are a lovely sight, but 52 Cygni shines so brightly that it tends to shade the delicate whiffs of the supernova remnant. For this reason I chose to increase telescope power to 190x and to concentrate on one of the "wings", leaving 52 Cygni just beyond the right border of the field of view. The details that emerged, left me with my mouth wide open. I hope that this sketch, albeit not a real telescope image, may have the same effect on you...